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Black Lives Matter
A dog whistle is language that signals alignment with a specific group, but that’s subtly coded so as not to provoke opposition from people outside of that group. According to Rising Out of Hatred, Donald Trump used dog whistles for the white nationalist movement during his 2016 presidential campaign. For instance, he said that he was qualified to be president in part because of his “beautiful, terrific genes,” or that he was going to “take America back,” which could be interpreted as subtle nods to white supremacy and white separatism.
Dog Whistle Quotes in Rising Out of Hatred
The Rising Out of Hatred quotes below are all either spoken by Dog Whistle or refer to Dog Whistle. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 12
Quotes
What Trump said during those next months was that he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the United States. He said he was the “law and order candidate” in the age of Black Lives Matter. He said he was qualified to be president in large part because of his “beautiful, terrific genes—a wonderful inheritance.” He said his primary goal was to erase the legacy of Barack Obama, the country’s first black president, who Trump continued to insinuate was a foreign-born Muslim. He said America’s inner cities were overrun by “gangs and thugs,” and “right now, if you walk down the street, you get shot”—and then to prove that point he re-tweeted a crime statistic suggesting that 81 percent of white murder victims were killed by blacks. A few days later, after criminologists told Trump that his number was wildly off base—that in fact it was only 14 percent—Trump said, “What? Am I gonna check every statistic?”
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Chapter 13
Quotes
The wave of violence and vile language that has risen since the election is only one immediate piece of evidence that this campaign’s reckless assertion of white identity comes at a huge cost. More and more people are being forced to recognize now what I learned early: Our country is susceptible to some of our worst instincts when the message is packaged correctly.
No checks and balances can redeem what we’ve unleashed. The reality is that half of the voters chose white supremacy...
It’s now our job to argue constantly that what voters did in elevating this man to the White House constitutes the greatest assault on our own people in a generation, and to offer another option…
Those of us on the other side need to be clear that Mr. Trump’s callous disregard for people outside his demographic is intolerable, and will be destructive to the entire nation.
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Get the entire Rising Out of Hatred LitChart as a printable PDF.
Dog Whistle Term Timeline in Rising Out of Hatred
The timeline below shows where the term Dog Whistle appears in Rising Out of Hatred. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 7
...avoids being photographed and jots down questions—about the Holocaust denial, the militant terminology, and the dog whistles about “their kind,” “infiltrators,” and “enemies.” She listens to Don and Duke speak ill of...
(full context)
Chapter 12
Don is amazed: this is the first time a U.S. presidential candidate is actively using white nationalist dog whistles and sharing messages on Twitter from a white nationalist account called @WhiteGenocide. When people commit...
(full context)
